There are so many things to remember when you are writing a story. There is always the grammar and the spelling that will constantly haunt you. But there are so many elements of the story that you must remember throughout the story to keep holes from forming.

Between the life changing events for your characters, items like clothing and objects that are important to the story, and the different people that come into and go out of the lives of your characters, you will find it difficult to keep up with everything, especially when you make drastic changes to it all over and over again.

Other things that come into play is the history of the world, the history of each of your characters and the history of the important items in your story. What about the future of the world, your characters and the items that they hold. These things change so often throughout the writing of the story. You will find that it will be a challenge to remember it all. That is, of course, if you don’t have a photographic memory. I know I don’t.

There are several ways that I can think of to help you keep track of all these things:

1. Write notes in your sidebar: I learned this little trick when I was in college taking notes in class. Draw a line down the center of your page (or set your margins in your word processor) so the right third of the page is blank. Write your story on the left side of that line, and take notes on what you need to remember on the left side. These notes make remembering certain information easier to remember, or at least find.
2. Use the footnotes feature on your word processor. Then all your notes will be at the bottom of the pages. Again, they will be easy to find.
3. Start a Story Bible. This is good for one story, but I find it really handy if you are creating a world where there will be multiple stories. You will be able to keep all the facts strait leading you to more believable novels.

See More Writing Tips.

If you have other ideas on how to find story ideas, write a comment. I would love to hear how you are inspired.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 10th, 2007 at 12:01 am and is filed under Writing Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.